Hazard A Guess: Week of June 4, 2009

Hope you didn’t miss us too much last week. Whenever a holiday falls on a Monday, we have a Thursday deadline for this section, which pretty much guarantees no one has seen the latest Hazard-ous item and immediately responded.

But we’re back, and we’ll reach back to Item No. 862, which had not received any responses for several weeks.

Joseph Betz of Library, Pa., reckons that’s because “this is just an ordinary “C” clamp used to attach things to an “I” beam.

Robert Haas of Navarre, Ohio (home to Nickles Bakery, in case you didn’t know that bread was Ohio-made), agrees. For 19 years, he worked in steel fabrications as a rolls operator and would sometimes need a special purpose tool, or in the case of our Hazard-ous item, a clamp.

“I would draw my idea on paper and send it to the burning table, where it would be outlined by a special pencil. The electronic eye would pick up this pencil mark and cut the image out of a steel plate up to 2 inches thick,” Haas explains, adding that perhaps that’s how this heavy duty, special purpose clamp was made.

Likewise, Tom Demko of Massillon, Ohio (who, incidentally, responded via our Web site), agrees that it’s probably a “C” clamp, adding that it looks to be homemade, since commercial ones are made of cast iron and are not as rugged as the one we showed.

Gene Halliwill also responded via the Web site on Item No. 862.

* * *

I was surprised we didn’t get flooded with answers on Item No. 863, shared by Reva Montgomery of Lordstown, Ohio.

Gene Halliwill was our lone respondent, but he was correct: It is a clothes washer.

So, on to a new item, Item No. 864, shared by Bob Hendricks of Leetonia, Ohio, via Larry Bennett of Salem.

The gizmo looks like a metal, wood-bottom lunch box, with a handle on the side (the side is about 8 1/2 inches wide), but when you open it up, you see a spool with a retractable metal wire cable that maintains its tension as it’s wound out. The handle moves gears to keep the tension even.